Vidar

Vidar is a story-driven game set in a community caught in a blizzard and facing its deaths. Each night, a villager is killed, changing the survivors’ stories and the course of your journey. You explore the townspeople’s grief and the community’s struggles while solving environmental puzzles before Vidar is lost.

A changing story

The villagers have interdependent relationships, and the random order of their deaths changes the quests and stories you encounter. For example, the blacksmith gives different quests depending on whether her apprentice or supplier has died; if she dies before both, their responses change in turn. Town events also reflect Vidar’s condition as jobs go untended, and quests and rewards depend on who lives and who dies.

Puzzle dungeons

To stop the killings, you enter a puzzle dungeon and use your tools and the environment to reach the center of a cave before everyone in town is dead. Each visit draws puzzles at random from a bank of hundreds, so a new story also brings a different challenge. The game has four puzzle biomes, each with its own take on classic mechanics.

Themes

The story explores grief, community, nostalgia and loss.